In recent years, mobile communication services have expanded and increased in popularity around the world. Many advanced networks offer wireless mobile communication service for voice calls, mobile phone messaging services (e.g., text and/or multimedia) and data communications. The data services, for example, enable surfing the world wide web, e.g., via a browser. The speeds of the data communications services have steadily increased as service providers have migrated the networks to newer generation technologies with broadband data communication capabilities, and the mobile stations have steadily advanced to take advantage of the new network technologies. The data communication capabilities of the mobile stations and the broadband data communication services offered by the networks enable users to perform more and more tasks and to access a rapidly expanding variety of content, all from their mobile stations. Examples of mobile station content items include, without limitation, media, games, messaging, social networks, stores, and any other applications or information for use on a mobile phone or on a tablet computer.
Referring to tablet computers, or simply tablets, these devices differentiate themselves from mobile phones in that they are larger than mobile phones and are used mainly for viewing published content from the Internet, such as video and news. Mobile developers today are increasingly creating applications for use on tablets. These applications are usually supplied through online distribution, rather than traditional methods of boxed software or direct sales from software vendors. These suppliers, knows as “app stores”, provide centralized catalogues of software from the operating system (OS) supplier or device manufacturer, and allow easy installation and updates via network communication. The app store is often shared with smartphones that use the same operating system.
It may be desirable to provide a mobile device, such as a tablet, with a capability of receiving multiple sources of live information that are related to each other, but are published and processed at different rates. For example, it may be desirable for a user to view video that is streamed live from the Internet to a client player using HTTP Live Streaming (also known as HLS) communications protocol. Furthermore, it may be desirable for the same user to simultaneously view other information, such as meta-data, that provides additional information related to the HLS video. Assembling meta-data and HLS video (for example), in which each is published and processed at a different rate and perhaps from different sources, for simultaneous display, in real-time has not as yet been implemented.
Hence, a need exists for improved technologies for synchronizing information (for example, HLS video and meta-data) that is published and processed at different rates, so that a viewer may comprehend the multiple information displayed on a mobile device, or a tablet.